Slashgeo

Slashdot discuss rumors on Apple and Google geospatial potential collaborations. The MacWorld is due tomorrow, so we'll see to which extent the rumors were right. The Slashdot summary: "AppleInsider is reporting that Apple has been working on OS-level integration of an geographical mapping technology as an integral part of Leopard, its next-generation OS. The technology is rumoured to employ GPS functionality. Will GPS chips make Apple iPod phones and MacBooks location aware? Users would be able to post information at a location, hanging in the air, ready to be browsed by people passing by. Imagine getting highly relevant messages, without even pressing a button, simply because you are in the vicinity and your preferences match the content of the post."

A friend wrote to inform me that within the new MacOS X Leopard (10.5) to be available in 9 days, there seems to be some geospatial awareness at the operating system level, well, more precisely GPS metadata support directly in Preview, the default small application that open any PDF and image file: "GPS Metadata Support: Get real information from your photos. If your image has embedded GPS metadata, Preview will show you exactly where that perfect photo was taken. Open the Image inspector and select GPS. Preview pinpoints the location where you took the photo on a world map. From there you can even open the GPS location in Google Maps." Not exactly groundbreaking, but still nice to see such integration. See also related stories below.

In addition to the important new terrain layer announced yesterday, Google Maps received a few significant updates, first, Google Maps searches are now providing a thumbnail of the related street view photo, second, the My Maps feature somehow becomes Our Maps, allowing to collaborate directly on someone else's My Maps, this has a lot of potential of getting big, and last, you can more easily share KML and KMZ files and GeoRSS feeds through My Maps. From the Our Maps announcement: "Just click the "Collaborate" link and enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite. They'll receive an email invitation with a link to the map. Once they open the map, they should be able to edit it, as long as they are signed into a Google Account that's associated with that email address. You can also open your map to the world so anyone can edit it by selecting the "Allow anyone to edit this map" checkbox."

mcknut writes "Apple have recently filed a patent application that suggests that they may be intending to bring map downloads to their iPod line using a technology they've called 'podmaps'. I actually knocked up a ruby script to do this a few years ago and I've put together a blog post with a bit of explanation, some examples, and a link to download the script. Get 'podmaps' on your iPod now." A few related stories copied below.

Here's a few recent Apple related geonews. First is the capacity for Mac owners to run Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D using the new VMWare Fusion: "Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D doesn’t yet run in a Mac OS X browser. Until recently, your only option was to install a copy of Windows on a different partition using Apple’s Bootcamp tool, and boot into it. [...] Sometime in the last few months, however, competitor VMWare came out with an update of their virtualization tool for Mac, Fusion, that does support VE3D." Additionally, The Map Room shares a complete guide to geotagging photos on the Mac. And finally, APB informs us Apple is encouraging iPhone users to help update the Skyhook wifi location database. On a side note, mentioning Apple products looks reasonable since they are increasingly popular even within geospatial professional, with now 14% of computer sold last February and almost a monopoly on portable music devices. Related previous stories added below, including an old one on running ArcGIS on MacOS X, but I admit omitting the numerous previous stories on geotagging photos.

Ogle Earth discusses the preview release of Cartographica, a GIS software for the Mac. From the entry: "I'm not a GIS pro, so getting results like that in a matter of minutes is a good sign on the ease-of-use front :-) While it's early days yet for this application, I think it's clear where its makers aim to position it: Not as an ESRI ArcGIS or Manifold competitor, but as something that is good enough for school users, GIS hobbyists and people who georeference their photos — for the last group, Cartographica has menu items like "Timecode Photos from iPhoto Library" and "Plot GPS encoded Photos"." Let's remember that the open source QGIS works on the Mac and that ArcGIS itself runs on the Mac through virtualization. See also related stories below. Update: 11/24 17:42 GMT by S : The Virtual Earth team also announced that VE 3D now runs well on a mac with virtualization.